Castle in the Air
by Rayless Night
Summary: Castles in the air and ivory towers, pretty ideals that can never be fulfilled. A short moment in Ethelda's life on Ciel and some unanswered questions of the past and future.


_Disclaimer: Wild ARMS IV is the property of XSeed and Media Vision (name incorrectly punctuated because FNN won't let me do it properly). Rating is for violent/gross imagery as well as references to some dark subject matter. Some content may be disturbing and/or triggering.  
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**Castle in the Air**

Ethelda Maverick leaned uncertainly over the kitchen table, then gently stroked Glucophage with one finger. The chipmunk's fine, incredibly soft fur rose and fell slowly and shallowly -then Glucophage shuddered. Ethelda withdrew her finger. _I'm probably frightening it._ Glucophage had never gotten used to her. She looked at the inverted bottle cap she'd set next to its nose but couldn't see that it had drunk any water. Ethelda sighed. He'd been through it before, but Jude hated seeing the animals die. He hated that his pets could go from young and playful to aged in just a few weeks.

Ethelda got up. Hopefully Jude would be back soon from helping Wyoming weed her garden. He'd need to say goodbye.

As she was at the counter, slicing a tomato for her salad, there was one emphatic knock at the door. Ethelda called for whoever it was to let themselves in. Loud bootheels clunked down the hall. That would be Henri.

He pointed a fat finger at her. "You weren't at calisthenics this morning."

"I didn't feel well."

"What sort of example are you setting that boy?"

"A bad one." Ethelda put a bit of tomato in her mouth. "Can I get you something?"

"Some water, thanks." Henri seated himself at the table and peered at the chipmunk. "Hm. This doesn't look good."

Ethelda compressed her lips and handed Henri a glass of water before returning to the cutting board. Jude had found Glucophage earlier that month, a half starving juvenile apparently too unintelligent to fend for itself. Jude was always finding animals, making pets of them, teaching them tricks. Ethelda suspected that he often confided in them, but whenever she hinted in that direction, he grew evasive.

Well, who else did he have to talk to, except for a village of adults?

"So," Henri was saying, "am I going to be invited to another pet funeral tomorrow?"

Ethelda shot him a Look.

Henri raised his eyebrows. "My apologies, Mother Bear. I just wonder... are so many funerals good for the boy?"

"They're his ideas," Ethelda argued. "He chooses the spot and makes a little gravestone, every time." One corner of their backyard was riddled with small stones, inscribed by some of the few markers Ethelda had brought from home, ten years ago.

"What's the little sufferer's name?"

"Glucophage."

"_Glucophage?_"

"He heard Solon and Heinrich talking one day, about nutrition, I guess. Then he asked me what a glucophage is, and I said it's something little that eats sugar." Ethelda fell silent then. Jude's next question had been "What's sugar?"

Something they eat in faraway places.

"Anyway," Ethelda went on, "he likes the way it sounds."

"A bit long to fit on one rock. Well, on the subject of young Jude-" Henri deliberately left off speaking then, waiting until Ethelda had turned around and given him her full attention. "I want to teach him sword fighting."

Ethelda was still holding her cutting knife. She slowly put it on the counter.

"Sit down and hear me out."

Ethelda sat across from him, leaning back in her chair, away from Henri.

"Jude is bored. He's explored every square foot of Ciel, every one he can get to. He needs something to occupy him and...an outlet."

Ethelda looked at the wall over Henri's left shoulder. "You think he's frustrated?"

"He's not a sit-at-home like you. He needs to try new things. Ciel's too small for him."

Ethelda rubbed her nose. "And how will a sword change that?"

"It'll let him flex his muscles a bit, apply himself to something new. He's athletic. Very."

Ethelda gave him a warning look. "I'm aware of Jude's abilities."

Henri crossed his arms. "Then why are you balking?"

Ethelda tried to keep her words from firing out too fast or loud. "Didn't we create Ciel to escape all that? Sword fighting isn't a game, it's training for battle. We didn't want that for Jude!"

Henri gave her a level look. "Hauser went back to battle."

Ethelda caught her breath in her teeth. "Because Ciel was 'too small for him'?"

"No, because he had-"

"You have some nerve."

Henri fell silent for a moment. "My apologies."

Ethelda sat still, watching the water in the bottlecap. There wasn't a ripple across its surface.

"I still think Jude would benefit from it."

Ethelda narrowed her eyes.

"Didn't you study a bit of magic when you were his age?"

"That was on Filgaia," Ethelda said flatly, "and it was for strictly intellectual purposes. I never wanted to hurt anyone."

"No more than Jude does. But the boy needs something new to learn. Unless you want to teach him nanotechnology."

Ethelda refused to lose her cool, so she took a moment in responding, remembering what she had been like at Jude's age, twelve. She'd just begun to take a serious interest in math and science, and she was studying magic at the Eleniak Academy. She and her twin brother, both awkward preteens, had grown apart, and she was spending much of her free time with school chums. They'd pass notes in class, categorize guys as "studs" and "four-alarm-dweebs" and spend their allowances on burgers and shakes after school. Jude had never been to school; his learning came from herself and the others in Ciel and from his own exhaustive explorations. He had no peers, had never seen a girl of his generation. As for food, he'd never had a burger and shake. He didn't even know what a cow or chocolate was.

"Jude needs a lot of things," Ethelda said. "But not a sword."

"He may have need of a weapon someday. Ciel is not a permanent sanctuary," was all Henri said. Neither of them said that if Jude ever did wield a weapon, it probably wouldn't be a sword.

"He needs an outlet."

Ethelda stood and began to pace. Did he really? Was he happy? This skewed reality on Ciel was all he could remember. If Ethelda had known she'd be cloistered up here for so long, isolated, in limbo, she would have thought longer about agreeing to it. Was it safe? Yes, from war, from imprisonment, from executions. But the early years had been very bad, people disappearing in the night, several suicides, Augst escaping with one of the prototype ARMs and a pod. Creating life on their scientific castle in the air had been slow and grueling, repeated failures dwindling their numbers until they'd gotten things right. Many people, out of desperation, loneliness or something else, had tried to have children. Diana, Mara, Wyoming and others had pregnancies that universally ended in still-births and miscarriages. Some of the women had died. Their unnatural environment was keeping them hidden, but it wasn't always healthy.

Jude, having been born on Filgaia and brought to Ciel at the age of fourteen months, had become something of a focal point for the village: a potential Gene Driver for a community of scientists to study, and an adorable child for a horde of lonely adults to love. Ethelda had always had many helping hands with her baby, yet... She would've preferred raising Jude somewhere else, in her hometown maybe, with just her husband and the grandparents keeping tabs on her. It irked her to think that Jude had a score of interested scientists overseeing his childhood.

Ethelda shook herself. _Oh, be quiet. It's not that bad._

"What would you tell him?" Ethelda asked. "'Jude, I'm going to teach you how to kill people. Oh, by the way, killing people is wrong.'"

"Some people need to be stopped. I think we can agree on that."

Ethelda nodded.

"Now's not too young to teach him that lesson."

Ethelda clenched her jaw. "Why not expose him to nanomachines right now, see if he's a Gene Driver, hook him up with an ARM and let him go off and fight and never come back-" Ethelda cut her words off. She spent the following silence trying to regulate her pulse.

"I think I've outstayed my welcome," Henri said. "Afternoon." He let himself out.

Ethelda slowly sat down again, rubbing her left collarbone, the one she'd broken when she was sixteen, rushing for the bunker during a bomb raid. The medic had told her it had healed fine, but she wasn't always sure.

_Maybe you're just afraid of losing Jude._

_Are you going to keep him ignorant forever?_

Jude, always so interested in the animal life around him, was surprisingly indifferent about his own family's past. He didn't know she was a scientist and that she hadn't been born on Ciel. He'd never asked about his father or grandparents, or what she'd been like at his age. Maybe the questions never occurred to him. Maybe what he saw was all he needed. Or maybe...maybe this was some lack in him, these questions he might've asked if he'd had a normal childhood.

At night, Ciel was paradise, surrounded by a maze of stars and fireflies. No sirens announcing another air raid, no scrambling for bunkers, no frantically watching live feeds from news websites, no radiation poisoning, no flying shrapnel, no walking down broken streets, finding human forms wedged into a gutter. No streets dark with flies and blood.

_Hauser. Why did you return to it and not to me?_

Ethelda shook her head sharply. She had to think of Jude, of whatever in this wicked world was best for her son.

_Jude, Henri wants to teach you to sword fight. Just for fun._

_A weapon? Just for fun?_

Ethelda walked into the backyard, one foot dragging aimlessly after the other.

Jude was on his way home, at a run no less, his small body focused forward, his legs going like pistons. For the briefest moment, Ethelda saw a faint blue flash around him. Then, faster than her eyes could follow, he had covered a hundred yards and smacked headlong into a pine tree. Jude tumbled to his back, pine needles dropping around him like confetti.

Ethelda didn't have Accelerator, but she was at her son's side in under five seconds. Just as she knelt next to him, he gave her the thumbs up. "Everything's cool."

"Your forehead is not made of steel, young man!"

Jude was sitting up. Ethelda put an arm around his slight shoulders, studying the shallow gash across his forehead. Jude touched it carefully and studied the blood with casual interest. "Whoah. I didn't know Accelerator could get _that_ fast."

"Were you_ aiming_ for the tree?" Ethelda demanded.

"Well...no. It just looked farther away in Accelerator. Everything moves so slowly. And then I came back to Normal, and the tree was suddenly there. So was I," he added after a thoughtful pause.

Ethelda didn't speak, remembering how she'd once witnessed Hauser walk into the rear end of a horse for precisely the same reason. If life had been different, she could've told him. She'd have to tell him some day, not the horse incident per se, but other important facts. But not now. No need telling him about a father who didn't seem to want to return, or the war-wasted land where he'd been born, or the reason he could Accelerate. Jude wasn't asking, and Ethelda felt fairly sure that meant he didn't need to know. Yet.

"So..." Jude wiped his nose on the back of his hand. "Is Glucophage better?"

Ethelda collected herself. "I don't think so. I think it's just his time."

Jude sighed heavily. "Right." He was silent a moment. "Okay. Well, I need to see him." He got to his feet.

"Before you get cleaned up?"

"Yeah."

She smiled. "That's fine."

Jude didn't feel like holding a public funeral. As he was carefully making Glucophage's headstone, Ethelda asked why not.

Jude didn't look up. "I don't think they understand. The others." He finished the final _e_ and put the stone to one side to dry. "I don't think it's very important to them. But he was my friend, so..."

"Can I come?"

He rolled his eyes. "Of _course_, Mom."

They buried the chipmunk, patted the stone into place. Ethelda tried not to think of all the soldiers she'd seen that no one had bothered to bury.

_Life's precious,_ she thought. _Wherever it is._

Dinner was quiet, which it almost never was, even after a pet had died. Ethelda reflected, sadly, that Jude was starting to grow up.

"Jude, I'll do the dishes. Why don't you go see Henri?"

Jude looked flabbergasted. "Master Henri? Why? I already did my exercises."

"He wants to talk to you. Run along."

Jude saluted. "And not into a tree this time."

Jude was back a half hour later. Henri must have wanted to make his first class easy. Ethelda watched him walking through the twilight, fireflies darting away from him. He had a blunt wooden practice sword in his hands, short and light.

"Check it out!"

Ethelda swallowed. "Yeah."

"Wanna see all the cool moves I can do?"

After a moment, Ethelda nodded.


End file.
